Stigler Center Assistant Director Matt Lucky reflects on the comments from his panel on competition advocacy at the 2025 Stigler Center Antitrust and Competition Conference. He weighs the meaning and possibility for a democratically legitimate antitrust and competition policy.
In the concluding panel of this year’s Stigler Antitrust and Competition Conference, our panelists, Michelle Meagher of the University College London, Sean Heather of the United States Chamber of Commerce, and Marianne Bertrand of the University of Chicago exchanged views on how corporate advocacy and civil society shapes policymaking and the marketplace of ideas, especially in the U.S. Their conversation closed the loop on this year’s theme of how economic concentration influences the marketplace of ideas. Earlier panels had contemplated how Big Tech platforms and government policies such as the European Union’s Digital Services Act shape discourse in the public sphere.
Where are the lobbyists for the people?
In her opening remarks, Meagher emphasized the value of building public repositories of knowledge in the antitrust and competition policy space. She discussed this theme previously in ProMarket, proposing the construction of an antimonopoly archive to provide the public with an accessible marketplace for scholarship on the antimonopoly or Neo-Brandeisian antitrust movement. In the panel, Meagher observed that the public is aware of the consequences of economic concentration, whether that be high costs of living and rising prices, the “enshittification” of internet services, or abusive digital platforms. Yet, the public often lacks the shared language required to convert those complaints into a coherent advocacy movement. The antimonopoly archives would afford them the common epistemic resources they currently lack.
Bertrand struck a more pessimistic tone, noting that advocacy by and for the public in antitrust and competition is difficult for two reasons. Firstly, antitrust policy is, in Marianne’s words, “really damn boring” for most citizens (this observation is unlikely to apply to the audience of ProMarket, but please remember, reader, that you are a more sophisticated raccoon than the average critter). Public ignorance in policy and politics is a well-documented and durable phenomenon, and that applies with special strength to technical questions such as antitrust enforcement and revising merger guidelines. Put differently, even though issues of concentration intersect with our lives constantly, it is difficult to encourage the public to pay attention to the arcane technical origins of social problems.
Secondly, Bertrand emphasized the asymmetries of power between the diffuse and disorganized public and the corporate incumbents benefitting from concentration. Lobbying and political campaigns are expensive, and corporate actors can afford far bigger guns. The “money that’s spent by businesses on lobbying compared to representative civil society or unions, I think the ratio is like 30 to 1 in terms of dollars,” Bertrand said. Further still, moneyed interests can deploy their financial advantages to capture and flip civil society organizations that ought to be speaking for the common good over special interests. Bertrand, along with her coauthors in their “Hall of Mirrors” paper, demonstrates how experts in civil society commenting on regulatory rule changes tailor their comments to suit the interests of grant-giving institutions. Taken altogether, public-oriented civil advocacy faces colossal opposition as concentrated economic forces can outspend the public on lobbying, purchase experts for hire, and capture civil institutions.
Heather struck a different note, identifying the major obstacle to advocacy work to be the cacophonic deluge of voices in the marketplace of ideas. In his telling, the basic work of advocacy entails 1) identifying shared matters of concern, 2) assembling interested parties, 3) reaching shared epistemic ground on the nature of problems, and 4) petitioning the state with proposed solutions. That model of advocacy breaks down under that torrent of claimants in the public sphere, which overwhelms the public’s capacity to center their shared attention on individual social problems and agree on how to act in concert in response.
Heather then raised a connected concern that the mechanisms of antitrust enforcement have been enrolled in a broad range of policy questions related to pursuing a “fair society.” He offered that “fairness is a legitimate conversation but it makes [Heather’s] blood boil if it’s going to be left to [an unelected] five-member FTC commission.” To wit, Heather informs us that there is a democratic deficit in play when the FTC moves beyond the confines of pursuing consumer welfare to more varied goals that can be summed up under the mantle of fairness in competition. Questions of ultimate ends, such as fairness, ought to be addressed democratically, according to Heather, by which he indicates that Congress ought to act to provide explicit guidance through legislation.
Stigler Center’s faculty director, Luigi Zingales, disagreed with Heather on his last point during the Q&A. In his research coauthored with University of Chicago professor Eric Posner and Georgetown professor and Stigler fellow Filippo Lancieri, Zingales demonstrated through an analysis of varied historical sources in the public record, including opinion polls, confirmation speeches, and party platforms, that there was no democratic foundation for abandoning the incumbent goals of antitrust enforcement beginning in the 1970s, namely, preserving the number of competitors in a market. These goals would be replaced with a narrower focus on efficiencies, prices, and output that would become known as the consumer welfare standard, one promulgated most prominently by the Chicago school of antitrust. The decades-long embrace of the Chicago school followed from an undemocratic movement among regulators and the judiciary to restrict antitrust enforcement, led by the likes of Chicago legal scholar Robert Bork, Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, and the Chamber of Commerce (Heather’s current employer). Hence, Zingales argued in his response to Heather that demanding congressional authorization for expanding antitrust concerns appears selectively invoked and self-serving.
Can antitrust be democratic?
In an ideal world, it would be wonderful for Congress to take the lead as a representative body to provide renewed antitrust legislation. Alas, Congress is extremely rigid and unresponsive. The instrumental work of legislating new policies has been abandoned in recent decades as representatives prioritize electoral competition above all else. In the absence of major structural reforms, “representation [in Congress],” as its earliest critics presciently contended, “is merely nominal—a mere burlesque.” Major legislation to curtail economic concentration is unlikely to be forthcoming from that body in which “no security is provided against corruption and undue influence.” Indeed, if we take seriously the risks economic concentration poses to responsive democratic governments, then the congressional pathway is a chicken-and-egg problem. We need proper representatives of the public in Congress to offer us new antitrust legislation, and we need robust antitrust to curtail the antidemocratic harms of representatives captured by concentrated economic interests.
Building a popular movement for stronger antitrust advocacy is another mixed path. Meagher is correct in her observation that issues stemming from economic concentration systematically impact the public, even when the public may not perceive the connections. Hence, communicating the linkages between the public’s daily frustrations and economic concentration may gain traction in public opinion. Yet with that said, I share Bertrand’s concern that antitrust and competition policy is simply unengaging for the mass public. Any popular movement for energetic competition policy will compete with many other social problems and movements that are also grasping for what little residual attention remains after work, family, and social media claim their cuts of the public mind. Furthermore, social movements generally appear to be less impactful in the contemporary era, and widespread public disinterest and ignorance on policy questions is, again, a well-confirmed feature of mass public opinion.
Further, there is a risk that mass movements are vulnerable to forms of capture by concentrated economic interests as well. Take, for example, the Tea Party movement in the 2010s, which Vanessa Williamson et al. found to be in practice two movements. One Tea Party was a local-level grassroots movement, and the second was a national, pro-business, elite-driven effort seeking to co-opt the branding of the grassroots movement for their own ends. That is, connecting with Zingales’ closing remarks of the Antitrust and Competition Conference, a popular movement favoring more robust competition enforcement may likewise be vulnerable to capture by populist elites and “broligarchs” to legitimize deploying antitrust enforcement as a political weapon.
A third pathway for democratizing antitrust policy might entail returning juries to antitrust trials and experimenting with representative minipublics—institutions of randomly selected citizens brought together to deliberate on a specific issue—along the lines of similar work by Oliver Hart, Helene Landemore, and Zingales for shareholder democracy. Such forms of direct democratic engagement by randomly assembled citizens provide an alternative basis for democratic legitimacy, independent of Congress and its members’ reliance on corporate campaign donations. Furthermore, while the mass public is perennially prone to political ignorance, smaller assemblies of citizens focused on individual policy questions are adept at learning and decision-making, as evidenced by juries proving to be capable in evaluating expert testimonies. Put differently, citizens are not knowledgeable by default, but they are knowledge-able when invited into decision-making. Alas, there are again reasons for skepticism about direct attempts at democratizing technocratic policy questions. To name one example, Shelia Jassanoff when writing on direct citizen engagement in technology policy consultations, raises the concern that juries, minipublics, assemblies, and so forth may serve as elaborate mechanisms for technocrats to manufacture public consent through illusory democratization.
In sum, each participant in this final panel for the Stigler Center’s Antitrust and Competition Conference agreed on the broad notion that democratic guidance in antitrust policy would be desirable. They disagree, however, on the approaches, the role of asymmetries of power, and the appropriateness of departing from the Chicago school of antitrust. What is more, democratizing the technical aspects of policy-making is a complicated problem space that does not afford us panaceas for social ills.
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